Lotusphere BoF - Working with the Lotus Connections API

IBM Global Services – Application Innovation Services

Birds of a Feather:Working with the Lotus Connections APISacha Chua (sachac@ca.ibm.com)

LivingAnAwesomeLife.com

Opinions here are my own and not my employer’s. No warranty, express or implied.

IBM Application Innovation Services

Goal: Get you excited about what you can do with the Lotus Connections API! You can do incredible things with the Lotus Connections API

I made a Community Toolkit that had a newsletter, metrics exporter, and data exporter. People found it really useful.

Good news! LC 3.0 documentation has more examples than the LC 2.5 InfoCenter (and it’s a wiki!). The examples will come in really handy when you build.

We’ll go on a quick tour of some things we’ve built informally, and then open it up to a discussion:

•What are you working on?•What would you like to build?•What questions do you have?•What can help you build better?•What have you learned? •What can you share?

IBM Application Innovation Services

You can do pretty cool things with the Lotus Connections API!

IBM Application Innovation Services

IBM Application Innovation Services

Data available for Communities in Lotus Connections 2.5

Components: Blogs, Wikis, Files, Bookmarks, Feeds, Forums, ActivitiesNumber of entriesUnique contributorsAverage per community memberAverage per contributorPercentage of contribution (unique contributors / number of community members)Views (blog – all time) / Downloads (files)Comments (blogs) / Replies (forum)Unique contributors in community

IBM Application Innovation Services

IBM Application Innovation Services

IBM Application Innovation Services

IBM Application Innovation Services

Tools Newsletter Metrics (# of contributions) Community data exporter Forum exporter Blog exporter (can sort by # of

votes) Member activity breakdown ATOM feed exporter (title, body,

author, e-mail, date, link) Community management

(creating, updating, renaming, copying)

Member management (adding or removing members)

Bookmark list export Bulk Profiles tagger

Ideas

IBM Application Innovation Services

Lessons learned working with Lotus Connections 2.5 You can do a whole lot with the Lotus Connections API! The service document doesn’t list everything. If you need to work with

anonymous APIs, you will need to customize some of the URLs. Trust, but verify. Systems and documentation sometimes disagree. Not everything is available through the API. For example, I haven’t figured

out the API way to get the structure of a wiki. Maybe in 3.0? Community news feeds don’t work for private communities. New wiki entries require valid XHTML, with an enclosing element. If

everything else gets created except for the wiki body, that’s why.

IBM Application Innovation Services

Resources Lotus Connections 2.5 API http

://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/ltscnnct/v2r0/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.connections.25.help/c_api_welcome.html

Lotus Connections 3 product documentationhttp://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/lcwiki.nsf/dx/Lotus_Connections_APIs_lc3

developerWorks > Lotus Connectionshttp://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/products/connections/

Sacha Chua (sachac@ca.ibm.com) - LivingAnAwesomeLife.com

IBM Global Business Services Canada, Application Innovation Services

IBM Application Innovation Services

IBM Application Innovation Services

IBM Application Innovation Services

Let’s talk about what you can do with the Lotus Connections API, and how!

Newsletter Metrics (# of contributions) Community data exporter Forum exporter Blog exporter (can sort by # of

votes) Member activity breakdown ATOM feed exporter (title, body,

author, e-mail, date, link) Community management

(creating, updating, renaming, copying)

Member management (adding or removing members)

Bookmark list export Bulk Profiles tagger

Ideas: